Teaching my first environmental justice class

I taught the first of what I hope will be a long career of classes in environmental justice this quarter. It was a 40-student upper-divison sociology course formally titled “Environmental Inequality.” My advisor Andy Szasz usually teaches it, but he had other responsibilities this year so I got to teach it instead. I had a great time coming up with my own syllabus, and Andy kindly sat in one day to observe and offer tips based on his many years of classroom experience. My father’s death in late January made this a difficult quarter, and Andy, Kevin Cody, Bradley Angel and Flora Lu helped get me through it with last minute guest-lectures and help with grading.

Since it was my first time teaching the class, I focused on getting the syllabus and lectures in order and didn’t get particularly creative with the class assignments and evaluations (5 pop quizzes, a take-home midterm and a take-home final). Hopefully there will be opportunities for that later. Instead, I chose a fairly straightforward lecture format interspersed with discussion, small group-work, movies and multi-media clips.

I’ve pasted the readings below, and added links and short descriptions of some of the things I did in class. You can also find a complete version of the syllabus with the rest of my syllabus collection here.

Video: Bird Like Me (5:48). I asked the students the following questions to get discussion going: What tensions did you see in the film? What different conceptions of the environment did you see? How does Wyatt Cenac feel about the Audubon Society’s involvement in Turkey Creek? How do the residents feel? You can read my other posts on using this Daily Show clip in the classroom here and here.

Activity: I asked the students to 1.) create a definition of an accident and come up with examples and 2.) discuss and take notes on when something ceases to be an accident and becomes ‘something else,’ and to come up with more examples of what the ‘something else’ might look like.

After we discussed their work, I asked the students to consider why it matters if something is determined to be an accident or not. We then made two lists of words on the chalkboard. In one column we put words that are used to describe problems as individual and unique, and in the other column we put words used to describe broad societal problems. Column A filled up with words like “bad apple,” “bad actor,” “individual,” “accidental,” “the exception, not the rule,” “local,” and “outlier.” Column B filled up with words like “structural,” “widespread,” “patterned,” “everyday,” etc.

Activity: The Story of Luis. See pages 3-4 in chapter 26 of Helping Health Workers Learn. I used this story to help train the students to analyze root causes of social problems. I read the story aloud and then asked the question, “Why did Luis die?” However, since I did not think the students would answer in the linear fashion modeled on pg. 4, I had them call out as many possible causes of Luis’s death as they could think of in no particular order. As they called them out, I wrote down their answers on the board in loose columns. The columns on the left were the most individualized (“he stepped on a thorn”) and the columns on the right were the most social (“global capitalism fosters social inequality”).

Activity 1: We made a list of common problems that arise between activists and academics in one column, and in a second column listed explanations for these problems.

Activity 2: Students got a chance to see a real world example of how one group of academics and activists are trying to work together productively. I handed out copies of the San Joaquin Valley Cumulative Health Impacts Project’s “Principles of Collaboration” document. You can see them here. Students read them individually and identified where they saw the activists’ interests being protected and where they saw the academics’ interests being protected.

Lecture aid: Voices from the Valley project overview. An alternate example of an academic (me) trying to work productively with activist groups.

Video: The Story of Cap and Trade (9:56) I asked the students to watch for 1) tensions between market-based and command-and-control regulation and 2) potential environmental justice implications of cap-and-trade regulation of greenhouse gases.

About Me

I teach, write and do research as a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. My work focuses on social movements, environmental justice, agriculture, toxics and climate change.

I also run Voices from the Valley, a website featuring environmental justice advocacy in California's San Joaquin Valley, and post on my personal site at tracyperkins.org.

In my spare time I take photographs and consult for non-profits... when I'm not out tending my bees.